One of the few things that bugs me about shutting down the the Raspberry Pi is how I need to toggle the power supply to start it back up. There are a few solutions around, like an inline power switch, or the MoPi shield.. or just pull the micro USB plug out of the socket & plug it back in again. None of these I was particularly impressed with, and I wanted something a bit more intuitive & automated (which makes it easier for the kids and wife to use). In a previous project, I'd u ...

You may have seen my blog post about creating a small portable media center that I can easily take on holiday to hook up to the hotel TV. If not, you can find it here; Raspberry Pi powered media center to take on holiday To reduce the amount space it took up, I used a cheap USB keypad which could be used to control the media center. It worked really well & having something hard-wired meant I didn't have to worry about a Bluetooth-paired device needing re-pairing. Howe ...

We recently went on holiday and I took my laptop & VGA cable with me. It was my intention to hook it up to the TV and play some media on it to keep the kids happy on rainy days (pretty essential in the UK!). It turned out the TV had the VGA port covered up by the mounting bracket, so we ended up putting the laptop on a chair and watching videos from there; it did the job, but there was a perfectly good TV I could have used. At home we have a Fire TV Stick that runs Kodi, but the prob ...

I’m building a home automation project which connects a Raspberry Pi to control my central heating. I wasn’t particularly happy ripping out all the existing controls, and wanted to piggyback onto them.. which helps if the Pi ever fails (I’ve still got the old controls to fall back on). I also didn’t want to mess with the existing heating control board, so bought a duplicate unit (British Gas UP2) from eBay for about £12.. I can perfect the project on that, an ...